I notice that business bank accounts are always mentioned in these sorts of lists. To me they seem like an extra overhead for no reason. You essentially have to ask a bank's permission and pay them just so they can accept your payments? So weird.
I could understand it if you had a business with employees and you sold products on a daily basis with loads of transactions, or if you plan to get into debt... but for invoicing someone every month? Personal account seems fine, and I'm sure people have several of them already.
The business is a separate legal entity to you. A business bank account clearly demarks what is your money and what is not. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a requirement to work with a lot of companies, if not a legal requirement for working with a ltd company.
Business bank accounts can be had for free - most contractor-friendly accountants have an arrangement with Cater-Allen, for instance.
It's not a legal requirement and they're certainly not free AFAIK.
It is a requirement for partecipating in certain contests (eg: Microsoft had a program for investing in indie games company and they required to use a business account entitled to the company) but I still haven't heard such requirement from a client.
> I'd be surprised if it wasn't a requirement with many clients though, it shows a level of professionalism.
Agree, but I've never seen such clause in a contract.
> You haven't looked very hard then...
I guess it's a service provided by only certain accountants?
All the (chartered) accountants I've talked to never offered a free business account.
They offered introduction to paid business account but that's the usual.
If it's not and there is a free business banking account with a reputable bank out somewhere I'll be happy to look into it.
Ok so the the two things I know of are that HSBC will give you a free intro year or two (but that's obviously only useful for a year or so) and that most contractor-specialising accountants have some sort of promotion/deal on with Cater-Allen to get you free business banking at their private bank.
Agree, after all it's just a way to keep expenses and earnings separated from your everyday transactions.
They are not required by law (here in UK) but they're suggested by pretty much every accountant out there.
I don't use a business account when working for myself, but I do use one for a company I've founded with other people.
I'd say it's more useful when it's not a one-man ltd.
HMRC like it and so do most accountants. While not a legal requirement it saves trouble if you ever get investigated (otherwise you have prove what each outgoing payment was).
Cater Allen is practically free, I think there is some sort of minimum average balance but if you keep both a rainy day and your tax payments in there it's a trivial task.
It's a relative term. First step is to eat food that's had as little processing as you can afford (which is the opposite of trans fats).
Ideally: if it's meat then non-intensive because that means less chemicals injected into the animals; if fruit and vegetables then try to source from farms that put an emphasis on re-mineralising their soils - they are less likely to rely on chemicals combined with genetically engineered varieties.
Essentially, buy food that makes the food industry as little profit as possible. The sort of food that would never be advertised on TV. The sort of food that costs a lot to produce, doesn't last long and lacks fancy packaging.
Partially hydrogenated oils do not exist in nature. If anyone finds that assertion confounding it'd be interesting to hear why.
There's some subjectivity as far as "processing" goes. Olive oil is processed mechanically, canola oil is processed chemically, so that's a pretty wide gap that people might fight over. But partial hydrogenation? Seriously?
Partially hydrogenated oils do not exist in nature
"Partially hydrogenated" describes what we did to the oil, so of course you won't get that without human involvement. Partially saturated oils, however, even ones with trans bonds, do exist in nature. For example, raw canola oil is around 0.5% trans fat.
That aside, I'm still not sure your classification for "processed" or "natural" makes sense. The key step in partial hydrogenation is mixing hydrogen with the oil, [1] while a step in canola refining is mixing hexane with the oil. [2] How does your naturalness heuristic tell us one is ok and one not?
[1] Which makes it surprising that this would create trans double bonds, since the effect is to reduce the number of double bonds. The problem is that with all that hydrogen available some bonds flip from cis to trans.
[2] As you alluded to by saying "processed chemically".
I did not offer a classification, which sounds like a very boring thing to do. Indeed, I meant to cast doubt on hard and fast classifications with the olive oil versus canola oil example!
I just don't think any classification could categorize partially hydrogenated oils as "natural" without rendering the term entirely meaningless. Because of what we do to make them, because of their effect on the body, or because of how they differ chemically from more "natural" stuff: take your pick. The point being, eating "naturally" might be a slippery concept but a lot of what we're talking about here can be safely excluded by anyone shooting for that "natural" goal.
Food threads on HN are dumb enough that I'm going to leave it at that. The parent comment has already been downvoted multiple times for some reason...
Natural simply means 'existing in nature', which humans do. Human activity is, by extension, also natural. Ergo, partial hydrogenation is natural.
But implying that something that is natural (ie, not borne of human activity, per your usage) is by definition good is fallacy. Remember that Socrates (among other enemies of the Athenian state) died after drinking an infusion of hemlock.
It took me 15 seconds to find a dictionary entry with seven different definitions for the word. But thank you for your valuable contribution.
> But implying that something that is natural (ie, not borne of human activity, per your usage) is by definition good is fallacy.
But as a heuristic it's probably not terrible. The paleo diet people have some strange ideas but the diet itself is really not bad. Veganism as a heart healthy diet is playing out well for a lot of people. And so on.
I often wonder if mental illness is a side effect of this shift from outdoor and natural forms of work, to indoor and stress driven types of work.
People have to teach themselves all sorts of coping mechanisms to stop their minds going out of control with modern work (burnout being a vague example around here).
Like all things its nature vs nurture. There are plenty of historical accounts of people being anti-social agoraphobes or autistic in the past. They were either labeled 'eccentric' if they were rich or crazy if they weren't. "Demon possession" during bible days was likely a form of mental illness, and those who genuinely heard "God" might have either been on psychedelics or had genuine conditions (schizophrenia comes to mind).
In addition to those government issues, there's less cash flowing from the non-existent workers to [local] businesses, which means that infrastructure from those businesses is no longer sustainable. The internet does that too.
Futurologists of the past speculated that salaries earned by machines would be shared out to civilisation (to allow us to stop working), but it's gone in another direction.
Robotic labor will be taxed and regulated in the near future, in most countries, to force such outcomes. Restrictions will be put on robot output or on how many human-hours equivalent they can operate per day.
Within a decade or so we'll see marches in the streets by lower-income laborers arguing for these changes. Robots don't vote, so it's obvious what will occur eventually.
the taxes exist already through tax on the companies profits. there will plenty of work for techs who work on robotic machinery, its not simply electronics, there is hydraulics, and more involved.
government increases the cost of each worker to the point that companies are forced to find alternatives that are cheaper. from mandated pay, benefits, employer paid fees and taxes, and costs of implementing safety regulations, support staff and their inherent costs, its not hard to see that to compete on a world market that automation will be used.
many jobs out there now currently have human robots for the most part, performing the same task over and over with little variation but a whole lot of opportunity to screw up. the labor component simply moves into new opportunities, including as stated into maintaining the new machines
alternatively, they could decrease income tax so that salaries can be lowered but net income remains the same (or even increases) to make robots less competitive.
The ad industry gets hit hard during bubble bursts and recessions. Two of the biggest ad sales companies are now Facebook and Google, so they wouldn't be immune.
At some point those vote-driven-websites are expected to mature and turn into proper publishing businesses.
Anything that's driven by users rather than vetted and sanitised by trusted writers/editors, will scare lucrative brand based advertisers. Just look at Google Adsense's content rules to see how much advertising shapes the web's content.
I think that's what happened with Digg. I speculate that something similar is happening with Reddit but at a much slower rate - like closing undesirable sub-reddits etc.
> According to Lucasfilm, Return of the Jedi, despite having earned $475 million at the box office against a budget of $32.5 million, "has never gone into profit".
Having children (and being married) is a tool for survival in harsh environments. Conversely, it can be seen as a trap/burden from a legal and financial perspective in a 'developed' country.
Interesting! It's almost as if we've evolved out the need to have children (no need for free hands working the fields, the ability to have sex for recreation instead of procreation, and children typically providing limited financial return compared to their historical role).
I could understand it if you had a business with employees and you sold products on a daily basis with loads of transactions, or if you plan to get into debt... but for invoicing someone every month? Personal account seems fine, and I'm sure people have several of them already.